Andy Chase

The urge to blather on about things comes and goes... since spring of this year it has been largely supplanted by my discovery of Flickr. The ratio of effort to gratification is much, much higher over there.

Back at the beginning of the year I spun off another weblog-type site using Textpattern, with the goal of making that my "Professional Weblog" full of Important and Useful entries rather than mundane or downright boring entries about what I did over the weekend or how much I like waffles.

Upon further reflection I'm not so sure it makes much of a difference, at least for someone like me. I lack the focus, knowledge, and energy to limit my posts to standard geek fare like software design or Macintosh punditry. I'm not really all that interested in cultivating a large audience, but after four years or so of mumbling into the void I find myself wondering why I still have any interest in this kind of internet presence at all.

It's not that there aren't plenty of things I'm interested in linking to, or dashing off a quick note about, or making available for download... it's that the free publishing tools and services that are available for each of those things are all pretty much mutually exclusive. If I want to gather them into a unified web presence I have to come up with my own glue, and that's just a pain in the ass. On the other hand, all of the attempts I've seen at a turnkey, all-in-one portal system that incorporates weblogs, photos, file downloads, etc. fail miserably. I'm not quite interested enough in trying to solve that problem to write my own, and so I wind up not doing anything.

In the end, I may wind up just putting into service the Blogger account that I set up back before anyone (myself included) knew what the hell a blog was, and having done with it.